


arbuzov letom (of watermelons in summer)

by FlamingoQueen



Series: A Hazy Shade of Winter [4]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Dehumanization, Food, Gaslighting, Gen, Mild Dissociation, One-Shot, POV Multiple, See endnotes for content warnings, Summer, The General - Freeform, Winter Soldier Bucky Barnes, standard Winter Soldier trauma umbrella, watermelon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-03
Updated: 2019-08-03
Packaged: 2020-07-29 14:35:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,986
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20083819
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FlamingoQueen/pseuds/FlamingoQueen
Summary: He’s tempted to raise it up to his ear and rap his knuckles against its smooth green slope, but that might be questioning the successful outcome of the General’s selection process. He might only mean to find out what a proper vegetable of this size sounds like—wouldonly mean that—but there are too many ways that could be interpreted differently.He won’t risk it. Terrible things happen when he questions the General’s choices.(Or: In which the Winter Soldier encounters a watermelon. Naturally, everything is horrible.)





	arbuzov letom (of watermelons in summer)

**Author's Note:**

> Watermelon was my mother’s favorite thing to eat near the end, and so we ate a lot of it this past month. Plus, August 3rd is apparently National Watermelon Day in these parts. Figured that was as timely a reason as any to post this.
> 
> (Also, behold the evidence that I can totally write a one-shot, and can also do “short” if “short” is interpreted relative to the other works in this series.)

**—Downtown Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan, 03 August 1951—**

At some point between their cool, predawn rooftop lurking and their current soggy stalk through the crowded afternoon streets, the day has turned into a wretchedly hot and miserable one, complete with air so humid it feels thick and sun so bright it almost makes him nostalgic for the prep room back at base and its dimly lit concrete and metal trappings.

Almost. 

Because nostalgia is a thing people experience, and he has not been a person for a while now. Possibly forever. The General says that there used to be a person where he currently takes up space, and that he has that person’s shape, but none of the inner workings. Like a pocket watch that’s been gutted but still tells the time twice a day.

So nostalgia is not for him. It was—maybe—a thing for the person whose shape he wears, but absolutely not for him. He is only close to a person, and so he can be only close to nostalgic.

Close to it, but not there. 

Because it is not for him, and also because it would be difficult to prefer being buried in the belly of a factory under fluorescent strobe lighting to being under any sort of sunlight at all in the open air. He is not a person, but he is not _ always _ stupid. Of those two options—closed darkness of cave and tomb, or open brightness of life-giving sunshine—one of them is the clear superior choice, even to him.

But he imagines what he is experiencing is something _ akin _to nostalgia. Maybe its neighbor down the street, or its second cousin several times removed. How close is he to being a person? Other than not being one, he isn’t sure. Is he more neighbor or more distant relative? Is he maybe an estranged distant relative?

He should not be thinking such things. Relatives are for people. Neighbors are for people. This whole line of reasoning is dangerous, is stupid, is inviting terrible things to happen. The only valid and valuable takeaway from that dip into forbidden waters is that he is maybe something near to being capable of missing things.

And why shouldn’t he have at least a little bit of fondness for that factory? It’s the base, after all, is home, and the prep room inside it is closer to shade than this city street manages to be, for all its overhangs and architectural elements. And this city is miserable, with its sun so fucking hot overhead. Hot enough even the Arm has noticed and is unhappy under the sleeve of the jacket he’s wearing. 

And that’s another thing. Why is he wearing a fucking jacket? Surely, it’s hot enough out here that a jacket is the opposite of circumspect, the enemy of inconspicuous. No one _ else _is wearing a jacket in this city, at least not out on the street. They all know better.

He swallows against the uncomfortable prickle of should-not-think-that that always chases anything remotely critical of the General that dares to drift across his mind. Terrible things happen when he is critical of the General. It is smarter to avoid doing that, and he is not _ always _ stupid.

And the General is wearing his coat, after all. Or _ a _ coat. A summer version of the one he prefers, one that is a lot cooler, and a bit lighter, and probably still miserable to wear in this heat. If the General is wearing even a summer coat right now, and the General most certainly knows what he is about, then wearing a coat is the appropriate thing to do.

And so his wearing this jacket—which is not a summer version of anything, and is not cooler than anything, and is not lighter than anything and is definitely miserable to wear in this heat—is also the appropriate thing to do.

Because the General is the one who decided what he would wear after this morning’s hit, is the one who packed that bag with the civvies they would change into once everyone who should be dead was dead outside the opera house, sprawled bloody and broken on the stairs, in the park.

If the General wants him wearing a jacket on the streets of Hell, or whatever city this is, then it must be a good idea. He has no business questioning it, certainly. Terrible things happen when he questions the General, and he isn’t going to do that. Because he is trying very hard not to be stupid.

These people in the streets might know better than to wear a jacket in this heat, but they know better for _ themselves_. They know nothing about him, nothing about the General, nothing about the mission and the bodies dripping red into the cracks in the concrete, between the blades of grass and the flower petals.

And they aren’t paying him any attention at all, which is the goal. No one even glances at them, despite their jacket and their coat and the half-seen heatwaves shimmering through the air around anything so unfortunate as to be made of metal and out in the sun, like a hellish halo rippling out into the ether. 

But not radiating off of the Arm. Because of the jacket. The General knows exactly what he should be wearing: It’s a jacket. His left shoulder would be on fire if he didn’t have the jacket on, the Arm burning where it kissed him with sun-soaked incandescent misery. The General knows.

But the General doesn’t seem to care that it is fucking hot with or without the jacket and that if he hadn’t been given water before coming down off the roof to hunt down the runners, he’d be less than mission-ready from dehydration and fairly close to heat stroke. 

There is a part of him that is internally scowling about that—internally, because it’s safer there—because that’s carelessness and the General should be above that. The much bigger part of him suspects it is not carelessness at all, but is an exceedingly careful plan. That’s the more likely explanation, anyway. They’ve made their hit, completed their objective, exploded the heads that needed exploding, sliced the throats that needed slicing.

That leaves the rest of the allotted time open for assessments of all sorts.

Assessments he’ll probably fail if he succumbs to any sort of heat-related weakness.

He wonders whether the General is planning to give him more water, or whether he will be putting his latest course of endurance training to good use this afternoon. They’ve had him run himself into the ground before, in all sorts of temperatures, most recently on the upper platforms in the boiler room, where all the heat gathered and suffocated and otherwise made for a miserable time. 

He knows his limits. He’s not close to heat stroke. That’s wishful thinking on his part. He’s not allowed to keel over just because he’s miserable. That would be giving up. Terrible things happen when he gives up.

And ultimately, it doesn’t matter whether there is more water or not. He’ll only need more water if the General gives him more water. If the General doesn’t give him water, even if they are out here another several hours, then he doesn’t need it. Wants it, maybe. But does not need it. If it is needed, it will be provided. Maybe there will be more water. Maybe there won’t.

Either way, it doesn’t seem like they’ll be going inside any time soon. The General is looking for something out here, and there’s no indication that he will find it, or even what it is. That means he is completely useless to the General in the search for whatever it is. All he can do to maintain an acceptable level of worth is serve as a sort of surveillance, visually sweeping their surroundings to pick up any traces of threat, studying the civilians to pick out any who aren’t as civilian as they seem.

That should be enough all by itself. The mission objective has been met, so he should not be fretting about what comes next. Whatever it is, it will just be a bit of bonus time with the General before they make their way back to base. It’s the General’s prerogative what the time is spent doing. If it’s endurance training in the streets of Hell, fine. If it’s drinking water, that’s… more fine. Finer.

All he knows for sure is that the General hasn’t called for extraction, and there are three different safehouses in this city, whichever city it is. The name slipped away pretty early in the op, though he still has the city’s layout sharply defined. The important things stick, most of the time. The General helps him remember the briefing details that really matter.

They are not heading toward one of the safehouses.

And after a few more minutes in the sweltering heat with his nondescript bag of artillery and tac gear over his shoulder and pressing hot against his back, they aren’t heading toward anything at all, but are just standing around.

If he thought moving through the crowd was sweaty work, standing still under the fucking wretched why-is-it-so-hot sunshine is a revelation in realized potential misery. Now there isn’t even the breeze of moving through the sluggish liquid air.

_ Humidity_, they call it. _ Heat wave_, some of the people on the streets have complained to each other. _ Unseasonable_. Well they can call it whatever people-things they like. He’ll call it Hell, and surely no one could challenge the assessment.

One hour into their seemingly eternal wait in the slowest-moving line he’s seen that could actually still be said to be moving at all, the General gives him more water. So he _did_ need it. Huh.

He hasn’t been permitted to express gratitude yet on this op, so the Soldier merely accepts the water and makes sure not to spill a single drop of it. The General is exceedingly generous to give him anything at all, and to let any of that generosity dribble away would be unthinkable.

It’s also a little unthinkable that the General should be made to wait in a line with all these milling civilians who are so much less important than he is. If the General was wearing his actual uniform, his actual coat with all the pins and medals… If he was carrying his actual identification cards and his actual paperwork… 

But they are not themselves on this op, and so the General is not a general at all, and doesn’t have the connections he has, and is as much a no one as these others around them. It’s unsettling. Irritating. 

It makes his teeth ache to witness the General getting less than he is due. And since he’s finally managed to fully regrow his molars after the halo session where the technician forgot to put the mouth guard between his teeth, the Soldier forces his jaw to unclench. 

It would not do at all to crack the damn things. They’re all of a week from newly grown. The General would be disappointed if he went and damaged them without cause. Irritation is not justifiable cause. Irritation would be just as disappointing to the General as cracked molars would be.

Terrible things happen when the General is disappointed. He will not disappoint the General by cracking his teeth. And if he’s very, very careful, he will not disappoint the General by letting his irritation show. Irritation is right up there with nostalgia on the on the list of things he is not supposed to experience.

Irritation is for people. He is not a person, and he only gets irritated because he’s a failure at being whatever it is the General has rebuilt him to be inside this shell a person left behind. The least he can do is try to hide that flaw from public view. 

The General has worked so hard, has put in so much time, effort, resources. He deserves to have a Soldier that at least acts appropriately, even if the insides are still a fucking mess.

And then they are finally, _ finally _ at the front of this abysmal snake of eternally patient nobodies, and he can turn his attention forward to discover what the General has been seeking this whole time, instead of merely keeping a watch over their overall surroundings. Can proceed to wait some more while the General… While he… While…

What the hell are _ those? _

What sort of mammoth vegetable gets that big? They’re like stripy green eggs in a basket if the bird that laid them was the size of a small bus. And they’re heavy, clearly, based on how the General is handling them.

A vegetable like that—maybe a squash of some sort? Though all the big squash he has heard about are more winter vegetables and not at all sunshine-pit-of-Hell vegetables… A vegetable that big would feed a whole family and then some, all by itself, as the only thing on the table.

The General inspects them one by one, moving the garbage vegetables aside once they’re rejected and picking up promising individuals to be thumped at and smelled. There must be a method behind selecting the right one, a method that involves all the senses. Looking at the exterior, listening to the interior, thumping at the sides, smelling the end with the little brown spot on it… He half expects the General to lick the vegetables next, though that doesn’t happen.

He wishes he knew this method, how it worked, the meaning of the signs the General makes note of. Then he could select the right vegetable while the General stood in the shade under that weakly flapping fabric awning.

Eventually, the General finds what he wants halfway down in the pile and turns to hand it over, depositing it into his jacket-clad arms without a word before paying for it, an exercise that seems to consist of arguing with the old woman selling the vegetables.

The green-striped vegetable is far heavier than it ought to be, even for its size. He’s tempted to raise it up to his ear and rap his knuckles against its smooth green slope, but that might be questioning the successful outcome of the General’s selection process. He might only mean to find out what a proper vegetable of this size sounds like—_would _ only mean that—but there are too many ways that could be interpreted differently. 

He won’t risk it. Terrible things happen when he questions the General’s choices.

What he _ will _do is follow the General back into the streets after he wins his argument and leaves the old woman muttering curses under her breath and complaining about robbery. The General doesn’t seem concerned by her words, so he figures there is no need to glare at her menacingly for the insults.

This time they _ are _heading toward one of the safehouses. If he was permitted to demonstrate gratitude, he would be tempted to do so, even without being spoken to first. It’s probably for the best that the privilege has not yet been extended to him on this op, since he’s so tempted to be stupid about it.

And so he spends the next however long alternating between inspecting the surrounding area for threats to the General—there are none, of course, but it pays to be careful—and inspecting this colossal green vegetable cradled in his arms. Because holding the thing requires both arms, just because of its size and awkward roundish shape.

Up close, he can appreciate the blotchy mottles of green-on-green running the full length of the vegetable. 

The dark green, like summer leaves on an oak, rich and deep, evoking the relief of shade that is nowhere to be found in this wretched sunshine Hellscape lined with concrete and filled with people and loneliness. 

The light green, like new spring leaves only a week after the last frost, when the air is still fresh and weightless, and the sun is still gentle and kind, far kinder than he was with the metal fistful of cello string—E, he thinks, maybe A?—sawing into a musician’s trachea under the happy, yellow blossoms of the golden-rain trees in the park. Not the first time he’s done that, he thinks. There was a different city once, in a different season, under a different tree, with different tactics… but same result. It’s always the same result.

He traces a finger along the yellow-cream patch on one side of the vegetable in his arms, feathered with scrapes and scars where it must have sat—a hulking, lurking behemoth—on the ground, possibly surrounded by others of its kind, or possibly set apart to lick its wounds unaided. 

The webwork of heavily stippled brown, dotted with holes enough to rival even the worst of his encounters with the medical teams and their endless needles.

The little dimple on one end that he would put up to his nose if he didn’t worry the General might feel he was challenging his selection and inviting terrible things to happen.

The thin brown curlicue on the other end, probably a stem that had tethered this gigantic vegetable to its vine like a man dangling from his gallows or a baby tied to its mother. The sort of cords one would cut to preserve a life, start a life, or in the case of this vegetable, seal in the inevitability of a death. Vegetables are to be eaten, after all, even if they are beautiful. And massive.

This thing _ must _have been grown on a vine. Given the size and weight, even a tree with a few of these on each branch would have had as much a struggle to stay upright as a leopard trying to haul two deer up a cliff at the same time. And all those vegetables in the pile, many of them even bigger than this one… No tree could manage that many of them in a season. No tree he’s seen, anyway.

Which doesn’t mean much, now that he is confronted with his limited repertoire of foliage and assorted flora in this world. It feels like he’s seen lots of trees, but it also feels like perhaps he hasn’t seen many of them at all. Curious. He’s probably just seen and forgotten them. That makes sense. He forgets pretty much everything else when left to his own devices and not helped along by the General.

Why not trees?

* * *

Once he’s completed his preliminary patrol of the area and the safehouse is locked up tight, the General permits him to strip out of the wretched, sweaty jacket—like peeling the skin off a fish the way it clings to him. It’s a tremendous relief to be free of the thing, which he knows better than to show, since relief is akin to gratitude, and that is still off limits. 

In the kitchen, the massive ovoid vegetable dominates its countertop like a rotund ruler surveying its domain of grungy chipped tile and cracked plaster walls. In the midst of its dilapidated kingdom, the vegetable is a conspicuous patch of robust beauty.

A distracting patch, too.

Maybe it’s the size. Maybe it’s the color. Whatever it is, the hulking brute of a vegetable exudes an air of self-important dignity he would never have suspected a vegetable could possess, especially after being lugged through the blindingly bright concrete streets and up the treacherously uneven stairs and down a dingy claustrophobic hallway and into a kitchen so filthy that it probably _ hasn’t _seen better days. 

Sacks of potatoes don’t have that attitude, and they probably have more right to it. They are a dietary staple that people depend on. He respects that even though they do not seem to be a staple in _his_ diet.

While he sits cross-legged on the kitchen floor, methodically breaking down, cleaning, oiling, reassembling, sharpening and polishing the small arsenal of equipment he’d been permitted to bring along, that vegetable beast keeps catching his eyes, keeps drawing attention away from the weaponry spread out in front of him, steals his focus for itself. 

He could have had this equipment fully processed and stored by the exit half a dozen times or more if the gigantic vegetable looming on the counter across from him wasn’t so damn fascinating.

And it’s just a vegetable, for all that its chipmunk stripes of rich emerald cut with veins of jade are lovely, bordering on stunning. He had more than his fair share of time to inspect the thing while carting it through the streets of Hell for the General. He should have gotten it out of his system then, had _ tried _ to get it out of his system, had obviously failed.

Terrible things happen when he fails, but he tries not to think about that.

There were people in line to collect these gemstone vegetables, and so they are a people thing. A thing for people. He has no business even looking at it beyond what was necessary to transport it and settle it into its station on the countertop as directed. His interaction with the giant vegetable is over.

Stifling a grumbled invective, the Soldier drags his attention back to the rifle he’s supposed to be breaking down and cleaning. He hasn’t even gotten all the pins out, and he’s been at it long enough he should be done already and everything both reassembled _ and _checked. 

Stupid vegetables with their ridiculous distracting beauty. He would hate the thing up on that grungy counter except that it’s so interesting. And why? Why should it be interesting? It has nothing to do with him. That is the General’s vegetable, long-awaited and hand-selected via mysterious means and signs. 

He doesn’t waste time staring at other things that are the General’s. Not even himself. Not even the Arm. And the Arm is arguably more interesting than the gemstone vegetable with its vivid colors and delightful pattern and jarringly massive proportions.

…And he is staring at the fucking thing again, damn it all.

The only saving grace to the situation is that every time the General drifts into the kitchen to check his progress, he seems to be less irate and more highly amused by the fact that the Soldier is so distracted by his purchase. Not quite to the point of smiling at him… at least, not with his mouth. There’s something in the General’s eyes that resembles a smile, though. Maybe a little fondness.

Of course, that’s almost certainly wishful thinking. The Soldier knows full well there’s little to be fond of where he is concerned, and much to be disappointed with, particularly while he is failing to keep his mind off the huge green mass on the counter.

He resolves to do better. _Be_ better.

And by some miracle and despite constantly interrupted focus, he manages to complete the post-op weaponry maintenance, and before dark no less. Maybe he is only five-eighths a failure today.

Regardless, with that task out of the way, he’s finally free to seek a new task, maybe another patrol of the perimeter, pacing the gloomy hallways, flushing out the constrictive stairwells, checking all the access points to the building… Just another few rounds to verify that the General will have as comfortable and secure place to sleep as is possible in this dump. 

Maybe the General will allow him to stand guard… 

Except that that will never happen, since he cannot be trusted to pay attention instead of drifting into the fucking kitchen to stare at the gemstone vegetable like an even more addled moron than he actually is.

He slides the last of the knives where it belongs, securely strapped to his thigh, and gets to his feet with the impeccably arranged equipment bag filled with glistening weaponry and polished leather tac gear. This will go in the other room, so that it’s near the exit if they need to leave quickly. 

Then he will ask for another task. Because he should be useful. Terrible things happen when he is not useful, and he is not so stupid as to invite terrible things if he can do otherwise.

Standing places him higher up than the gemstone vegetable, but the thing still somehow looms. Somehow pulls at him as though it were so much more than a simple vegetable on a disgusting safehouse counter.

There are a few minutes, perhaps, before the General next comes to look in on him, to determine the reason he’s even more silent in here than he was before while seeing to their equipment. This is a prime opportunity to get the wretched gemstone vegetable out of his mind for good. He just needs to stare at it closely for a little longer, to give in, to accept the compromise to his programming it represents and then move beyond it. 

If he wallows in the murky pit of his failures once he’s tumbled in—really acknowledges his flaws in their deep, glacier-carved valley—then it is sometimes easier to drag himself up the other side afterward. And sometimes there is success waiting there for him at the top instead of another headlong plummet into the dark.

He leans forward, puts his nose near the colossus on the counter. He won’t thump. He won’t touch. But the General had smelled it, had smelled a lot of them before deciding this one smelled the best. A cautious sniff reveals that the best of the gemstone vegetables from that chaotic nest in the market smells… 

Green. 

He straightens up and stares at the gemstone vegetable through narrowed eyes. 

It _ smells _ green. It _ is _green, and it smells that way, too. He has not thought that colors could have corresponding scents. What does green smell like aside from this gemstone vegetable? Because that seems to be the way things would play out. All good gemstone vegetables smell green… and maybe a little sweet… but not all green things smell like a gemstone vegetable of high quality.

A question to ponder some other time, if he remembers to do so. 

He inhales another noseful of green while the opportunity presents itself, and lets the breath out slowly. Now he knows another of the signs to look for should he ever be tasked with selecting one of these. 

Smelling the gemstone vegetable the General bought has no negative outcomes he can see so long as the General doesn’t see him doing it. But he won’t touch the gemstone vegetable, not even to turn it around so he can study that yellow-cream patch with all the stippled webwork scars. 

It belongs to the General, and he knows better than to handle something that belongs to the General without having first been instructed to do so. 

He has not been invited. Terrible things happen when he presumes to mess around with something he’s not been invited to investigate. He’d like to think he’s more curious, and less stupid. And sometimes he probably is.

Anyway, the mottled greens on full display are the prettiest part of the gemstone vegetable. They are what keeps drawing his attention, and so they are what he will content himself with in this effort to finally purge the distraction from his system.

It would be less appealing if the stripes were solid, if their borders didn’t melt into one another with blotchy speckles and tiny islands of dark in light, light in dark. Each shade is distinct, unblended, carefully kept apart from the others—but delicately, with a light touch. For all that separation of one from another, there is no sense of rigidly imposed order.

The notion prods something else into his thoughts, something fluid and dancing, here then there, never still enough for him to actually think it. Something about order, rigidity. Or maybe something about opposites coming together into a thing of beauty. Or maybe—

There are words.

The General speaking words.

Behind him.

For an endless frozen moment, he is not chasing down a passing thought, is not thinking anything at all, is emptied out in a blind panic even as his body spins around, jerks away from the General and the gemstone vegetable alike, struggles to suck in some air and also not to breathe.

_ Understood _ crashes down on him, reverberates in the cavern of his skull, floods the rotting swampland between his ears, blots everything else out. _ Understood. Under— _ But no. This is not a time for “understood,” not a time for verbal confirmation of any sort. 

This is a time for compliance, for… for… For what? 

What does compliance look like right now? Shit-fuck. Terrible things happen when he does not pay attention, and the inky viscous dread slinking black and glistening up his spine tells him that he has not only failed to make note of the General’s presence, but has also failed to comprehend the General’s instructions.

Understood? Why would he even dare to think such a thing when he clearly doesn’t understand? To utter such a thing would be to lie. Unspeakable things happen when he lies to the General, so far beyond terrible that there are not words, spoken or silent, that could fully encompass the misery that would result from his trying to lie.

The General puts a hand on the back of the chair nearest himself, pulls it away from the little table with the uneven legs, does not sit. 

He doesn’t look… He isn’t outwardly displeased. Somehow. 

There’s the little almost-a-smile expression, the one he’s seen the General wear multiple times this afternoon when he catches the Soldier guiltily looking away from the gemstone vegetable. There is maybe some amusement in the General’s eyes, maybe something playful. Not something angry. Not something disappointed, though he cannot understand why that should be the case. He’s a constant source of disappointment despite all his efforts to be otherwise. 

It’s still possible that what follows will be an exceedingly well-earned punishment for wasting space and time and the very air itself. The General is sometimes very easy to read, and sometimes a complete mystery. This could easily be one of the times he’s misinterpreting the General, is seeing something that is _ not _ there in a distorted mirror of his having just failed to hear the instructions that _ were _there. 

It’s also possible that he is being given a reprieve, is experiencing the General’s mercy. Wishful thinking, which he still sometimes falls into as though any wish of his would ever be granted. But technically still possible. Anything is possible. And he will never see it coming.

He made a lovely crimson mess of blood and skull fragments earlier, on the steps to the opera house. Five targets. Five kills. He has done well. He dispatched the runners, stalked them through the park with its golden blossoms and labyrinth hedges, strangled each of the terrified witnesses from the orchestra with one of their own cello strings—in one case, hard enough to detach a head. He has done well.

He silently accompanied the General through the city afterward, despite the heat and the jacket and the temptation to complain about it. He has done well. He carried the gemstone vegetable for the General, and while he could not mentally put it down afterward, he _did_ physically set it down on the counter as gentle as could be. _He has done well._ He really has.

He’s also failed to listen to the General, failed to understand his command, failed to comply with that command, failed to do more than stare at him after that first impulsive retreat. And that surely outweighs any success he’s managed to scrape together. He would wonder what reprimand is on the way, except that comes close to second-guessing the General, and terrible things—

“Come over here, Soldier,” the General says, every sound enunciated and firm. Unmistakable. Unconcerned. “Sit.”

Compliance will be rewarded. He knows that. Compliance will be rewarded. And noncompliance will be rewarded…differently. There is no debate about which reward he prefers. 

The Soldier closes the distance and drops down onto the little chair the General indicates. Maybe the General _ is _ actually fond of him today. He did well, after all, earlier. With the killing. He always does well with the killing. He is good at that. Good at bringing death to others. 

The General wants him to sit in a chair the way people sit in chairs. Maybe he will be allowed to express gratitude now, as well. If so, he will express gratitude for being allowed to comply, even after his failure to pay attention. A second chance is a gift all to itself. And terrible things happen when he rejects the General’s gifts.

The General doesn’t add anything to the command, though. He merely goes to one of the cabinets to retrieve a large metal pan that would be rectangular except for all the dents in it, and then a trio of chipped plates from another cabinet, and sets the dishes on the table, followed by a large kitchen knife in need of a whetstone.

The Soldier tries to claw his way through the sudden whirlwind of possibilities presented by the knife-and-pan, possibilities that flash like visions behind his eyes and ambush him and cart him away before he can object. A blood-filled pan. The grating fiery tug of an unsharpened knife pulling through flesh, through skin and veins and arteries and bones, and he has complied, he has sat in the chair, he has earned a _ reward_, and… and… 

Compliance will be rewarded. But the General would not throw him away after putting this much work into him. After teaching him how very eternal he is. How ineffective such a knife would be, even wielded by someone with a right to end him.

The _ plunk _ of the gemstone vegetable into the pan startles him back to the table and the chair and the General who dictated that he be a bringer of death and not a recipient of it, and who is, of course, not about to change his mind on the matter. 

He’s not done _ anything _so successfully as to have earned _that_ glittering prize. It’s ridiculous to have even entertained the notion.

“There isn’t a Russian alive who fails to appreciate a watermelon in the summer, Soldier,” the General says. 

And the General knows what thoughts and images have just finished ripping through his brain. He _ knows_. He has to know. The General knows everything, has seen inside his skull without even needing the bone saw first. He knows, but his voice doesn’t sound angry-teach-you-futility. It sounds… inviting?

He blinks up at the General, forgets to school his expression into flatness. Is that an invitation? An invitation to… appreciate…? Couldn’t be. This is a lesson in cultural norms, so that he knows what people do, and therefore what is forbidden to him. But he won’t presume to know that yet. An assumption like that could be dangerous.

So. Appreciation. Watermelon. Summer. The gemstone vegetable is a “watermelon,” then. Too bad he’s already settled on a different designation. He will have to avoid referring to it aloud, lest he use the wrong designation and run the risk of contradicting the General.

Terrible things happen when he contradicts the General.

And now it _ is _ time for _ understood. _ Because he is ready to understand, ready to be directed, ready to learn what the General intends to teach.

“Understood.” 

* * *

The gemstone vegetable is _ red _inside. A bright and cheerful red. Not a dark and broody red.

He had not expected it to be red inside.

To be more accurate, he had not expected anything at all, because expectations, when they are _ his _expectations, are pointless at best and cruel at average—to say nothing of the worst outcomes. Knowledge of this doesn’t always save him from having expectations, but this time, it has.

Still, if he had expected anything, it would not have been this.

And since the General seems not to mind his interest, and maybe even to be inviting it, he doesn’t bother to try to hide his fascination. He’d have failed at that, anyway. Has been failing at it for hours now.

So when he finds himself leaning forward to stare at the circular expanse of red revealed by the General’s knife, he doesn’t follow the discovery up with a guilty scuttle backward in the chair. The General does not mind the interest, but he might mind the opposite of interest, or a denial of interest, or a fear of showing interest.

Terrible things happen when the General minds something he’s done. Or not done.

Regardless, the gemstone vegetable lives up to its designation, adding brilliant ruby to the collection of vivid colors. Bright, deep, and almost translucent like he imagines—remembers?—a gemstone would be. And cut with thin ribbons of paler red, almost pink but not so blended as that, swirling like currents in a creek or the grain of a rolled loaf of bread, little wispy eddies twirling about in a garnet stream.

And dotted all over are seeds like shiny black birds’ eyes, a playful onyx stippling along the red in a pattern he could see if he stared long enough. Peering out of the gemstone flesh like they were actual birds, fixing their eyes on him, meeting his gaze and returning it tenfold. A crimson bird staring him down from twoscore unblinking eyes, or even more.

The knife interrupts his view after a moment, and the General’s hand, and the wobbling of slice after slice toppling over to the side in a pile of even discs, each with a full accompaniment of glimmering teardrop eyes and thin, pale curls splitting darker red from darker red like separate neighboring seas in an ocean. 

Each ringed with white that somehow blends perfectly with both the red interior and the green exterior, but without becoming a muddy mess of badly negotiated compromise. There’s harmony here, and order, a peaceful concession from both sides that they will meet amicably in the middle. Peaceful, painless, like order isn’t supposed to be.

Each pass of the knife through the gemstone vegetable sounds fresh, sounds crisp and wet at the same time. And each pass draws more thin, pink liquid out to run down into the pan. He supposes the earlier flashing image of violence was not entirely incorrect. The pan holds the gemstone vegetable’s blood very well, collecting the juice in a growing pool under that rocking green underbelly.

There’s something almost sacrificial about that. Ceremonial, maybe.

The General quarters each beautiful, crimson-centered coin, and stacks up the resulting triangles to one side, a tower of green-edged ruby wedges rising up from a plate that does not deserve to be graced by them.

If he had known just what it was he held as he followed the General back here from the old woman and her nest of bus-eggs, he would have handled it even more gently than he did. He’d have given the gemstone vegetable the reverence it was due. Might even have stroked its sloping emerald sides some more and held it closer to his chest.

Of _ course _the gemstone vegetable had radiated importance and pride on that countertop. Look at it.

And the General has chosen to share this with him. To show him what the gemstone vegetable holds inside itself, to allow him to… appreciate the watermelon. Like a Russian. Like he _ belongs _ somehow, not only to Russia, but as something _ of _Russia.

The need to express his gratitude is nearly overwhelming, almost as staggering as the very concept of belonging, of being a part of something, of participating instead of being directed, of being… something more than a puppet dangling on razor wire strings.

But he has not been permitted. He’s been… _ included _… in this summer ritual with the gemstone vegetable, but that does not convey a free pass to other privileges as yet unearned and therefore withheld from him.

It’s an effort, but he swallows down his gratitude along with all the other emotions tumbling about inside him, the ones he can’t put a name to, the ones he is probably not supposed to be feeling at all, except that he’s so very broken still and can’t yet help it.

And when he surfaces from the torrents of forbidden emotion, his consciousness gasping like a diver kept down too long and with the terror of those last precious underwater seconds clinging despite the sweet air rushing into strained lungs, there is something new waiting to knock him over.

The General has placed a triangle of glistening red gemstone vegetable on one plate, and four half-inch chunks of the red flesh on another, and is pushing the latter forward, until it rests in front of him, its ruby quartet picked clean of seeds, blinded.

The Soldier waits.

This is not a directive yet. Sometimes things are placed near him—in front of him or to the side, or even occasionally handed to him—but not for him to have. Not for him to eat, or drink, or make use of in any other fashion. He has learned this lesson well. A blanket folded within arm’s reach on a freezing winter night is not a blanket he can huddle under unless or until the General says as much.

Terrible things happen when he reaches for something he has not been invited to take. And it is always better—safer—to interpret proximity as incidental, meaningless, a mere chance occurrence, instead of accepting an offer that has not actually been extended.

After a drawn-out pause, the General nods, clearly satisfied, maybe even pleased, and then taps a fingertip lightly on the edge of the proffered plate. “Those are for you, Soldier. Eat them.”

And now the General _ has _ issued a command, _ has _ extended an offer, has granted a favor and passed down an edict. This is the time to comply, and so he does, reaching forward and gingerly lifting up one of the pieces between thumb and index finger, bringing it up for a closer inspection.

There is a small pock in it where the onyx bird’s-eye seed had been, gaping like a bit of gumline after a pulled tooth. The rest of its surface is wet—feels wet and looks wet, which makes sense given how much juice the gemstone vegetable has poured out for them—but also grainy somehow. He can see the light from the bulb overhead reflecting off the pebbled surface, the minuscule shadows falling across it.

It’s yet another harmonious contrast, the crisp, rough texture from the inside versus the waxy, green smoothness that surrounded it. The hard, protective shell hiding this delicate little morsel and the expanse of red it came from.

Just as the burst of vibrant red had been a surprise to see inside the green-striped exterior, so too is the gush of sweet and cool and refreshing that spills out across his tongue when he puts the piece in his mouth and chews. He has had things that were sweet before. They were cloying and overpowering, and left a taste behind like a sugary oil slick.

This, though… It _ is _ sweet. There’s no denying that. But it’s mild, light, almost insubstantial—which is in itself a surprise, as everything else about the gemstone vegetable has been significant and very, very solid. This sweetness, though, is not quite fleeting, but also not obtrusive.

And the flesh crunches when he bites, a muffled internal echo of the sound the knife had made slicing it, and leaks more of the sweet juice the more he chews. It crunches, and crunches, but doesn’t get soft. Every time his teeth close down on it, it becomes smaller but retains the sound and feel of gentle crunching.

He has had things that were crunchy before, too. Most of what he eats is crunchy, is hard, dry, something to be worked at patiently despite the taste or else he’ll sacrifice a tooth to carelessness. But those things, the flattened nutrient bars that shed thick flakes he doesn’t dare lose track of but painstakingly sweeps up with a finger to ensure he lets nothing be wasted… 

Those soften after a while. Become soggy mush if he has enough water to help him wet them down while he chews. He can chew them until there is nothing left to chew and finally swallow when he’s certain he won’t choke.

The gemstone vegetable is possibly the very opposite of what he is usually given to eat. It does not lose its crunch at all. It supplies the water he will need to keep his mouth wet enough to chew. It gets smaller and smaller the more he works at it, instead of expanding awkwardly and sucking any hint of moisture into itself.

This little ruby niblet gives him two whole mouthfuls of pleasantly mild sweet juice, and leaves behind the tiniest bit of solid mush, which bafflingly _ still crunches _ when he grinds it experimentally between his front teeth. Every single part of it is relentlessly crunchy. It could do this all day.

There’s just the hint of a soft mental echo at that, but he’s supposed to ignore those, and he does. It’s bad enough he forgets the things he’s supposed to remember. All the clutter only makes it worse, makes it harder to concentrate on the right-now and latch onto the important things, makes the important things slide away. 

And he wants to remember this gemstone vegetable.

He could continue to work at the impossibly crunchy wad of mush in his mouth, but the other three pieces of gemstone vegetable look far more appealing on the plate. He wants to move on to one of them instead of savoring the least enjoyable part of the first piece.

He wonders if he is permitted to take the spent bit out of his mouth, or if he is meant to swallow it. The General did say to eat the pieces, and while it was more akin to drinking than anything else, there is this solid bit that seems like it ought to be swallowed if he is to have eaten as commanded.

“Lost its appeal, has it?” The General casually flicks another black seed out of his own piece of the gemstone vegetable, sending it to land in the seed pile he’s accumulated on the other plate, with a solitary, spent curve of white and green.

Technically, that is true. He should agree. The remainder of this piece of gemstone vegetable is unappealing when compared to the first several chews. But it’s still far better than the rations he usually eats, and he would not want to risk turning a disinterested eye on any part of this appreciation ritual he has been invited to participate in.

The General chuckles as he turns over his triangle of red, inspecting it for hidden seeds. “Eat what you like, Soldier. Spit out what you don’t.”

This is a very forgiving appreciation ritual, if participants are permitted to appreciate only part of the gemstone vegetable. And yes, he would prefer to spit this out. The General doesn’t mind. The General suggested it. But it would be disrespectful to spit part of the gemstone vegetable out, as though _it_ were garbage and the fault wasn’t entirely his own.

He reaches into his mouth and takes the leftover bit out, setting it carefully on the plate where the little cube had formerly rested in all its ruby splendor. The next little tidbit soon replaces the first in his mouth, and sweet gushes across his tongue again, as satisfying as the very first encounter.

With this piece, he discovers that he doesn’t even have to chew for the gemstone vegetable to give him more liquid and also make the crispy crackling crunch sound—he can just press it between his tongue and the top of his mouth. And it will practically dissolve, but with all the bubbly prickle of its previous crunching.

This must be the source of the gemstone vegetable’s weight. It’s just full of refreshing juice, somehow cool despite being in the same sweltering, fanless apartment as the two of them. The gemstone vegetable is undeniably better than anything else he’s had the misfortune to remember eating, so much so that any comparison is insulting. It’s delightful, exactly sweet enough to be tasty without crossing the line into disgusting like so many things do.

He finishes his remaining pieces in methodical, carefully timed fashion, trying to demonstrate his interest, to savor the experience and fully participate in the appreciation ritual—with the General, like a Russian—but without revealing the full extent of his enjoyment. 

It’s a tricky field to navigate. He is meant to be enjoying the gemstone vegetable, is meant to be participating, is meant to appreciate. He has been invited, and it would not do to fail to accept the General’s invitation fully.

But enjoyment is for people, participation is for people, appreciation is for people, and he is not people. It would not do to repay the General’s kindness and inclusion—allowing him to sample personhood so that he can know, perhaps, what to avoid?—with an act of forgetful rebellion.

He must be walking that tightrope with precision and grace, because the General places an entire triangle of blind gemstone vegetable on the plate in front of him, the seeds removed and no limit to the amount he could put in his mouth at once. It’s tempting, so tempting, and his eyes can’t help but flit between the General and the gemstone vegetable he has—maybe—been offered.

But he has learned that lesson well and it doesn’t abandon him now. He waits. Terrible things would happen if he didn’t.

“We’ll risk a larger piece, Soldier,” the General says. “Take small bites, and leave the rind behind. When you have finished, go ahead and do another perimeter check.”

He waits only just long enough for the General to finish speaking before reaching with both hands for the glistening ruby wedge. Small bites. It will last longer that way. Leave the rind behind. That must be the green-and-white bits the General has stacked like ribs on his own plate. A perimeter check. He gets to eat this gemstone vegetable, an entire piece, all to himself, and then he also gets to secure the premises?

He very carefully does not ponder the other side of this equation. All things have to balance in the end, and that is a lot of good things all piled up together on one side. 

* * *

When he returns from his rounds—all clear but for a public window wedged open three floors below, but now that window won’t be opening at all any time soon, at least not without a pry bar and lot more leverage than anyone without a metal arm could lend to the task—the General is clearly preparing for a bath, maybe a little impatiently. 

Perhaps his perimeter check was too thorough, took too long, caused the General wait on him when he wanted to proceed with his nightly ablutions and get one more step closer to sleeping. The General would not want to sleep while his Soldier was still on patrol. He would want to receive a sitrep in the case of anything worth bringing up. 

The General would want to issue whatever orders were required to sustain him through the night. He would wait so that he could do these things. He would wait… on him.

Terrible things happen when the General has to wait on him. 

Sometimes. Not always. It depends on the kind of waiting. 

Waiting for an answer, waiting for an assessment, waiting for him to understand a point or learn a lesson like the futility of suicide or why not to reach for something he has not been offered… That’s not so terrible. The General is very patient. Will repeat a lesson as often and as brutally as needed until it sticks. Will bore holes into his head with his stare until the answer arrives.

But there are other kinds of waiting, and the Soldier suspects this has been one of them. And he thought he was doing so well.

The General leads him to the kitchen, which no longer bears any marks or signs of the gemstone vegetable appreciation ritual, and brings out the travel tin neatly stocked with the hard, rectangular biscuit-bars that form the basis of every substantial meal he can remember eating. The General places two of them on a plate, sets the plate on the counter.

He ate one of those on the roof that morning, just before the sun poked its head out from behind one of the other buildings to flow brightly along the concrete stairs, and before he put bullets in the other heads on those stairs. It was disgusting then, and these will be disgusting now. Disgusting enough to cancel out the remembered sweetness of the gemstone vegetable.

Hard to tell whether this is punishment for the wait or just the latest meal to mark off the schedule. Terrible things would happen if he asked. If has to ask whether something is a punishment, that something will automatically _ become _a punishment, regardless of what it was before, and will redouble in intensity. 

He knows better. He keeps his mouth shut.

It would be a disappointing development if he were actually the person whose shape he wears and had any right at all to be disappointed. But he is not that person—is not a person at all, and needs to remember that, since it’s one of the important things—and so he has no right to disappointment and is not disappointed. He isn’t. 

Terrible things happen when he allows himself to be disappointed by anything, but even worse things would happen if he were to dare pretend that the General has disappointed him. That, he knows, goes the other way around.

A glass of water is set on the counter beside the plate with the nutrient bars. And it is a nearly full glass of water. The water goes more than halfway up the height of the glass, and while it could have been filled all the way to the top, it is still more full than he deserves after delaying the General with his obsessive and unnecessary attention to detail.

Maybe this is not a punishment? A punishment would not include water to help him get the rations down, to unstick the flaky sawdust from the insides of his mouth and throat, to aid in softening the compressed gravel the bars might as well be made from.

He ate one of these earlier, and then the gemstone vegetable. Two more now mean that he will have had three of them. That’s appropriate enough for the activity level on this op, factoring in the heat. Of course it’s appropriate. This is what the General has determined he will consume, once he gives the order to do so, and therefore there was never any question about its degree of correctness.

He tells himself that he was merely agreeing with the General’s decision, was going over the facts—yes, three, that’s right, I agree—and was not in any way questioning it. Terrible things happen when he questions the General.

But the General does not require his agreement. To go over the facts and agree with the course of action—uninvited, without being asked for a tactical assessment of any sort—to _ judge _the General’s chosen course of action… 

There is no correct answer to the dilemma, and the best thing he could do is to just stop thinking entirely. Thinking never gets him anywhere good, and leads him to something terrible even more often than it leaves him stranded in the dark staring out into the void looking for something he doesn’t even remember.

“Eat these. Drink that. Then check the hallway—only this hallway, and no further—and settle yourself by the door for the night.”

_ Understood. _All the instructions are clear and direct and precise, exactly the way they should be, and exactly what he might have expected, if he was so stupid as to let himself expect anything. Expectations lead inevitably to disappointment, and he knows better than to experience disappointment if there is any way he can avoid doing so and the terrible things that follow.

Should he say “yes, General” because he has no argument and is going to comply, or should he say “understood” because he knows what is wanted from him… and is going to comply? He has done well today, but he has also failed today, and recently. 

Which response would be more pleasing to the General? Which one would tip the scales toward more of the gemstone vegetable, or even just less of whatever punishment is waiting around the corner?

A simple confirmation nod would be far too little. But “I am ready to comply” would be too much, he knows. Over the top. Possibly insultingly so. Suspiciously so. “I am ready to comply” should be saved for the call and response, anyway. Overuse would be… bad somehow. 

He’s not sure why, which just means it’s not something he should know. As he’s already gotten himself turned around by thinking too hard about things, he opts to just leave that there without poking at it.

He settles finally for a nod _ and _a “yes, General,” because there is a chance an “understood” could convey the impression that he feels there is something potentially unclear about the instructions and that there is a need to confirm that he has worked his way successfully through the confusing element.

The General seems satisfied enough by that to leave him to it, and since the General’s satisfaction is ultimately the only goal worth striving toward, he allows himself a bit of relief before he has to stare down—and choke down—the rations. 

At least both the plate and the glass are on the counter, not the table. So he will be able to stand up like whatever he is, and not sit down like a person at the table. That’s another thing to be relieved about. 

As novel as sitting in the little wooden chair had been, he doesn’t feel comfortable sitting there without explicit instructions to do so, and direct supervision while the sitting takes place. Without the General there, how is he to gauge when it has been too much, too long, too… person-like? He wouldn’t be able to. And that means he could overstep the boundaries of the gift, could take more than was offered, could risk deluding himself into thinking he owned this shape he wears.

Terrible, terrible things happen when he forgets that he is not the person he appears to be. When he rejects what the General has to offer him. When he tries to be more than what he is.

He doesn’t want terrible things to happen anymore. He wants them to _ stop _ happening, however unlikely that is. And the only way to get that outcome is to comply. Compliance will be rewarded. Compliance will always be rewarded, even if he is too stupid, or too blind, to see the reward for what it is.

And compliance means putting the rock-hard nutrient bars into his mouth and gnawing them into progressively smaller pieces until they are small enough and wet enough to swallow and keep down. Compliance means putting the glass to his lips and drinking the water—and that’s something he wants to do, so complying is easy. Compliance means… 

Hm. It doesn’t actually mean cleaning the plate and the glass when he has finished the first portion of his task list. He was not commanded or even instructed to wash up. But there is soap by the sink, and he was not specifically ordered to leave the dishes unwashed. His orders can be interpreted as including this unspoken step in the process.

And if he doesn’t clean them, the General might take it upon himself to do it, and that is beneath the General. The General has already washed the dishes used during the gemstone vegetable appreciation ritual, while he had scoured every nook and cranny and perch and crevice of the building… and took so long that the General waited on him. 

The General should not also wash these dishes.

He should make things as easy as possible for the General. He causes the General enough inconvenience on a regular basis, takes up enough of the General’s time and energy. Here is an opportunity to mitigate that.

He will wash these dishes.

He will wash the plate, will put the plate in the cabinet where plates go, will put it right on top of the other plates in the cabinet where plates go.

He will wash the glass, will put the glass… 

If he puts the glass in the cabinet where glasses go, then it will require another step for the General to fill it up again if he is going to give the Soldier more water, possibly in the morning when he has to eat another one of these disgusting nutrient bars. 

But if he leaves the glass on the counter, maybe even right by the sink so that it is clear that the glass has been properly washed and dried rather than left where it was last used, then it will be easier, more convenient, for the General to put more water into it.

And he _ should _make things as easy as possible for the General.

### Coda

The General makes a point not to actually look at his Soldier as he leaves the bathroom behind and moves through main room to the kitchen. He doesn’t have to study his Soldier’s pose to know full well what he’s up to, tucked against the wall beside the door, knees up and head down, as he was instructed, but eyes bright and rapidly shifting to focus on him. 

It’s a resting pose, and one his Soldier shouldn’t shift from unless directed to do so by a handler or spurred to action by an intruder. Not even to move his eyes from the floor in front of him and follow a handler around the room.

Of course, his Soldier has difficulty with that, has a tendency to look up and track handlers and support staff alike with his eyes, desperate for an invitation to be useful, or to be included. 

Others have found it difficult to break that habit, but he’s not sure it needs to broken at all. One should pick one’s battles, and he would far rather focus Yarolsav Danilovich’s attention on building up the necessary buffer zone around Longing. 

Keeping Rogers and the rest buried and out of reach—and cauterizing what won’t stay down—is far more important than beating excessive attentiveness and eagerness to please out of him. Excessive attentiveness can be turned into an asset, and eagerness to please is already an asset. Captain Rogers, not so much.

He finds the kitchen much as he had expected. The plate is clean and in the cabinet. The glass is clean and beside the sink—anything to make it easier for more water to be put into it. It’s as close to asking for more water as his Soldier will get, and he’s tempted to give in and fill the glass. It’s been a long, hot day, and his Soldier is bound to be suffering the effects.

But while filling that glass would hurt nothing in the short term, it would sabotage the goal of training his Soldier not to express—or even to have—desires of any sort. 

His Soldier wants water, that much is clear. He won’t admit to wanting it, won’t come right out and say that he wants it, won’t ask for it in any direct fashion. But he’ll hint, and if hinting gets him what he wants, then he will go on wanting things. And so hinting must achieve nothing, and the glass must go unfilled.

The nutrient bars have been eaten, though, and he didn’t even have to play impatient observer while they went down. And stayed down, by all appearances. His Soldier would have informed him of any mishaps in that area, even while maintaining resting pose. Protocol dictates a rest of any kind is interruptible if there is a need to make a report—security, malfunction or otherwise.

And protocol _ has _to dictate that, because his Soldier’s common sense is severely impaired by his eagerness to follow instructions. In the case of nutrition, this is a twofold problem. His Soldier will consume anything he is directed to consume without regard for his body’s distress signals. That is problematic enough, but without the report protocol, those distress signals continue to be ignored long after the meal has been finished, sometimes to the point of damage.

In some ways, that’s a marvel of successful conditioning that took long years to achieve. In other ways, it’s a strategy he would rethink if he were designing this project from scratch. In the removal of self-image, too much self-preservation has been stripped away.

But eventually they’ll see some success in crafting a liquid regimen, and that will solve some of the dietary maintenance issues. He’s thrown enough resources into the initiative to see results soon, and rightly so. Divorcing the physical problem of dehydration from the psychological problem of thirst will go a long way toward breaking his Soldier of wanting things, while sidestepping the difficulty he has with digestion. 

And it will make feeding his Soldier easier whenever some vengeful asshole on the prep team takes a page out of Voronin’s book and arranges for his Soldier’s teeth get broken under the halo. 

His Soldier’s teeth _ do _ grow back, as they had learned after what was euphemistically recorded as a “training incident” three years ago involving a brick, an impatient guard currently employed as worm food, and a broken jaw. 

They grow back, and they do so with the force and determination of a tree ripping up concrete to make room for its roots. Or, specifically, with consistent enough force to displace and ultimately reject the finely crafted hardware implanted to replace those missing teeth, much to the amazement of the oral surgeon he’d hastily conscripted into the project.

His Soldier and the serum running through his veins never cease to be remarkable. But that regenerative quality is no reason to withhold the mouth guard, and neither is petty revenge for a broken wrist that was clearly the result of carelessness while checking for surgical scarring. Voronin should have counted himself lucky to escape with merely a broken wrist and not also a broken _ neck_. 

Kuznetsov before him hadn’t been so lucky, and neither had half a dozen others when his Soldier still had some fight left in him, still clung to the half-remembered scraps of Sergeant Barnes that flapped in the wind like so many filthy rags.

The fight’s gone now, most of that raging inner fire reduced to flickering motes of ash and the odd glowing ember. Just minor flashes of the defeated enemy, easily guarded against with some precisely applied conditioning until they can be ground out under the excavation team’s bootheel.

With the fire burned low, there’s little left to protect the softer, gentler interior facets of his Soldier, the tender shoots that could as easily be cultivated as ripped out by the roots. 

He knows full well what the miserable little Swiss worm would have wanted, what he still wants. But Mother Russia will not suffer a HYDRA monster to shelter under her wings and spring up head after head of malcontented spite.

His Soldier lacks the Sergeant’s defenses, it’s true, and that could easily lead to that loyal, protective kernel deep inside him being corrupted. But what the Soldier himself lacks, the General will just have to provide.

And that means kindness alongside cruelty. 

That means that for every callous insult or undeserved reprimand, there must be a soft word or little treat, something to nurture the gentle spirit tucked safely away while the hard outer shell is beaten into shape and tempered.

It means that a facsimile of camaraderie must be built up between Soldier and handler, between Soldier and keeper, between Soldier and support staff. Something that connects them, tethers one to the other, one to the many, his Soldier to the the myriad members of the project, any one of whom might hold his leash at a moment’s notice.

And it means walking a fine, fragile line between what is and what seems to be. Kindness and cruelty are neither the two sides of a coin nor even a double-edged sword cutting this way and then that. They are the selfsame razor edge of a single blade slicing red across the canvas of its victim.

Heads? Tails?

This way? That?

Nonsense. It is both. _It is always both._ Everything is a matter of perspective.

Has it been kindness to give his Soldier a taste of summer, a glimpse of belonging? He certainly enjoyed it, once he’d been allowed to do so without fear of reprisal. And he’d been enjoyable to watch, learning the world around him like an infant reborn under the halo time and again, always fresh, always empty and ready to be filled up.

Or has it been cruelty, setting up so pleasant a thing that must also be so fleeting, that might never be repeated, that might not even be remembered? Is the temporary shimmer of sweet mirage worth the hours his Soldier has spent engaging in obsessed, compulsive weighing and measuring of the day’s events, the agonized internal debate over whether his successes balanced his failures?

Both, of course.

In a way, it would be kinder to issue the baldfaced reprimand his Soldier is expecting, the one he’s _ been _expecting that keeps diving close and then floating out of reach. Kinder to reward the repeated noncompliance—because that is clearly what his Soldier thinks his distracted staring this afternoon has been—with the sort of punishment that will ensure that the next time he’s faced with an intriguing mystery, he keeps his eyes off it. 

But a solid portion of his strategy is to keep his Soldier guessing—the lady or the tiger, a caress or a slap, kindness or cruelty—and it’s worked far better than he’d anticipated in the years he’s spent building his Soldier back up from the pieces they dragged out of that ravine and polished up with elbow grease and torture.

He will give his Soldier more watermelon in the morning. Perhaps even two pieces of it.

Kindness? Cruelty?

There’s really no telling what it will actually be, which interpretation will appear to weigh more heavily on the scales, regardless of what it looks like in the planning or the execution. Everything will fall prey to the fickle variances of perception, and that is perhaps the way it should be, a mystery even to himself until the die has been cast and the cards flipped over.

The only solid guarantee at this point, in his Soldier’s life and in his own, is that _ he_—his Soldier’s keeper, his Soldier’s General, above any other handler and regardless of what anyone else in the project does—will always reward him for being compliant. 

He will not always issue a reprimand for failure, cannot be counted on to reward noncompliance with pain, is not a reliable source of punishment. But when his Soldier does well, he can be certain that there will be something good coming his way.

For a certain interpretative value of good.

**Author's Note:**

> Content Warnings:
> 
> This takes place during the early years for the Soldier, and his suicidal ideation is still pretty fresh. It doesn’t feature often or excessively, but it _is_ in here, and it can be sudden. If you want or need a warning about which paragraph/s to avoid and how to pick them out for said avoidance, send me an [Ask on Tumblr](https://flamingo-queen-writes.tumblr.com/ask). I’m happy to give you that heads up.


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